After a long period of inactivity on my website, I've decided to, again, switch platforms, update my portrait portfolio and website overall. This time I've followed some good advice from pro photographers and kept it simple which in my case means that I've skipped designing and developing myself and opted out for WordPress + commercial portfolio theme. Designing and developing your own site is an infinite loop and it really draws time and energy that I could use for actual photography work and content creation for this site. There are of course design and coding details that I would do differently if I chose to do everything myself but this will I hope do its job properly too.
My previous version of the site was based on Drupal and while it's a much more powerful platform it proved to be overkill for a small site like mine. The learning curve with Drupal is quite steep, but not impossible to get around even for a designer like me but some basic functionality needed a lot of work or help of a professional... and time. Drupal's interface is overly complicated too and makes a basic thing of creating content discouraging which is one of the main reasons why my portfolio was was scattered around various photo sharing sites like Flickr, 500px and social networks like Facebook and Google+.
This fragmentation made it difficult for any potential client or people interested in your work to get a sense of my work and artistic direction. Even me consolidating my portfolio made me more aware of where I am and how I would like to develop as an artist. Now it's time for less talk and more work 🙂
Cheers,
Marko